Fora de joc a Montserrat

Offside in Montserrat | Empúries, 2021


Humor and brilliance shine through this third installment of the Oriol Comas series, where a monk mysteriously dies in the abbey of Montserrat during a board games meeting.

After the end of the pandemic, the abbey of Montserrat is promoting activities to bring back visitors, and game creator Oriol Comas i Coma has taken advantage of it to organize Ludocànon, an international gathering of experts in board games, with the goal of choosing the hundred best games in history. But on the afternoon of the first day,

when the fifteen judges are about to have dinner, a monk shows up dead in one of the rooms of the Hotel Abad Cisneros where they are staying. Comas, helped by his niece Sol, will soon find a connection between the death of Father Mateo and other recent deaths of monks that seem accidental. And worse still, Sol and her boomer boyfriend, the journalist who used to work as head of publicity for Grup 69, start to realize there is a relationship between these murders and things that happened years back in the choir.

With dialogues filled with charisma, hilarious situations, and a story suffused with generational clashes, the novel brings the intrigue of crimes and games to one of the most iconic and mysterious places in Catalonia.